The current hype around “big data” raises the spectre of big budgets to match – but, says ANGELINA DOS SANTOS-BARRETT of Innervation, most retailers can extract far more value from their current data without embarking on expensive specialist projects…

Many retailers are missing opportunities presented by their loyalty programmes in particular, she says. If your loyalty information is sitting in an isolated database, you are really not getting value out of that investment. You have their name, their card number and the fact that they’ve made at least one purchase — but are you looking at exactly how many times they’ve been through your tills and what they bought? Do you have an understanding of what might motivate them to come back?

According to IDC, the market for big data technology and services will reach $16.9 billion by 2015, up from $3.2 billion in 2010.Making it easier for organizations to quickly adopt and deploy big data and cloud computing solutions, IBM (NYSE: IBM ) today announced major advances to its PureSystems family of expert integrated systems .

Federated cloud could also be known as an orchestrated cloud – where you are not just joining up compute, storage and network services, but are also hooking up other low-level cloud services (data, CDN, messaging, integration, “Hadoop-y” things, etc.) to meet your needs. This means that not only would you be managing the individual clouds, but orchestrating services across them. Your application better be somewhat cloud aware to make that happen.

To be “big data” it has to be useful, and IDC says that in 2012, only 23 percent of all the information created or replicated in 2012 would be useful “if it were tagged and analyzed,” and that “only 3 percent of the potentially useful data is tagged, and even less analyzed.” Of the potentially useful data, nearly half is surveillance footage.

Industrial and consumer sectors are finding innovative uses for machine-to-machine devices in places you might not expect. Automotive insurers, for instance, are starting to offer drivers the option of installing an M2M device that monitors their driving habits.